Faith is Leaning

Faith 3

          So far in this blog series I have give you two definitions of faith. Faith is seeing with your heart. Faith is stepping out on the belief. I should be moving on past definitions at this point but I find I must bring you one more. As a man who works in words I find I love them. When used properly they can be so precise, so revealing, so targeted. In the context of this discussion, they are highly helpful. They show us exactly what God wants us to understand about Him, about our relationship to Him, and about how our lives are supposed to function. The definition of faith I bring you today is exactly this, at least it is to me. So what is that definition? Faith is leaning.

          I attended a Christian high school. It was operated by a local independent Baptist church in our area. At various times, between 5 and 20 children from our church attended this school along with me. The church that sponsored the school was bigger than our church. The pastor was younger than my father, who pastored our church, and he was much flashier than my father. He attracted people to him with seemingly little effort, although I am sure my teenage understanding was rather immature and ill-informed. At any rate, after a few years of mushrooming growth the pastor sadly succumbed to moral failure.

The resulting implosion in the spirituality of the teenagers in that high school was fearful to see. It still haunts me, truth be told. More than three decades past, and most of them are still out of church, dealing with various addictions and divorces, and the consequences that come from a life lived away from God. Each of us is responsible for his own sin, but that man will answer to God for being the earthly genesis of much of it. That genesis of an entire life lived wrongly well into middle age I faced as a teenage boy. My classmates went from being serious about God to being hypocritical, from being sold out to selling out, from being all in to being into everything. They smoked. They drank. They partied. They became sensual. They became hardened toward authority and toward preaching. In short, they became the infamous rebels that are the subject of so many Christian school chapel sermons.

I am no better than any man, and substantially worse than quite a few. But God in His grace gave me the grace to take a stand when most of my classmates went the wrong direction. In a word, I did not follow the multitude to do evil. I kept walking with God. I tried not to be a goody two-shoes or a Billy Bible about it, but I just kept on the same spiritual track we all had previously been on.

Some years later I found myself face to face with one of my high school classmates. He knew and I knew what had gone on back then, what he had done and what I had not done, and the path our lives had taken over the intervening years. He looked at me, mustered up his courage, and gave voice to a question that he must have pondered for quite a while. He said, “Tom, you stood back in the day when we all went wrong. How did you do that?” I thought for a moment, and then answered him simply. I called his name and said, “I did not stand. I leaned. It just looked from a distance like I was standing.”

Paul said it this way to a weak but strengthening Corinthian church. Moreover I call God for a record upon my soul, that to spare you I came not as yet unto Corinth. Not for that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for by faith ye stand (II Corinthians 1.23-24). How did I stand when those around me were falling? By faith. It is the same way Daniel and his three friends stood. It is the same way Joseph stood. It is the same way David stood. It is the same way anybody who has ever stood for God has managed to stay upright. By faith, knowing what was right, we leaned our human frailty upon the Lord. We depended upon Him to give us the strength to be and do what it is we were supposed to be and do.

Perhaps the most well-known passage on faith in the Scripture record is Hebrews 11. It lists example after example of saints of old who did spiritual things others around them found impossible. Explicitly, Hebrews 11 links those spiritual exploits to faith. How did Noah prepare an ark when everyone in his world was going the other direction? By faith. How did Abraham obey when he went out not knowing whither he went? By faith. How did Sara find the strength to carry and deliver a child at a marvelously advanced age? Through faith. How did Moses turn his back on all the pleasures of sin a rich, young Egyptian man could indulge himself in? By faith. How does weakness become strength? By faith. How do we obtain a good report, a good enough report that years later men marvel at how we stood and compliment us on it? Through faith.

One of my favorite Scripture passages is Deuteronomy 33.27. The eternal God is thy refuge, And underneath are the everlasting arms. That phrase is familiar to you because of the wonderful hymn, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”

What a fellowship, what a joy divine,

Leaning on the Everlasting Arms!

What a blessedness, what a peace is mine,

Leaning on the Everlasting Arms!

Leaning, leaning,

Safe and secure from all alarms;

Leaning, leaning,

Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.

          That is what faith is. It is leaning on someone else’s strength. It is realizing you do not have the ability, the power, the strength, the talent, the experience, the personality, the charisma, the charm, the authority, or the force to accomplish something you are supposed to accomplish. So you go to the Lord. You reach out to Him. You tell Him you know you are incapable of doing this or accomplishing that. You humbly bow your heart before Him and simply ask for His help. And then you lean on Him.

          Others marvel at what you accomplish. They sit back and say, “Wow.” But you know it is not in you to produce a “wow” out of anybody. All that is in you is debilitating weakness. So you lean. You depend on Him.

          That is faith. And it wonderfully pleases God.